The invention relates to the field of electronic calendars.
Electronic calendars, which may be provided as functions of personal computers, laptop computers, desktop workstations, personal digital assistants, server applications, and the like, have become widely used as a convenient way of keeping track of appointments. With the agreement of the calendar's user, appointments may be scheduled directly from electronic invitations that arrive in the form of email to add meeting notices to the appropriate pages of the calendar.
As with any kind of appointment system, a meeting that has already been scheduled may sometimes need to be rescheduled. In the case of an electronic calendar, a particular kind of meeting invitation called here a “rescheduling invitation” may be sent out by the originator of the meeting. With the agreement of the calendar's user, a scheduled meeting may be automatically reschedule for another time or date based on the rescheduling invitation.
Some meetings may be standing meetings, for example a meeting to be held the first Tuesday of every month at 9:00 AM to discuss a budget. Suppose that the meeting to be held on Tuesday, 4 May 2004, is rescheduled for Monday, 17 May 2004, at 10:00 AM. A user of an electronic calendar who has become accustomed to the normally scheduled time of such a meeting may be at a loss when viewing the calendar page for Tuesday, 4 May 2004, as the regularly scheduled meeting, once rescheduled, no longer appears on the calendar where the user expects. This may cause the user to miss the meeting, or to endure the frustration of searching through the calendar to determine whether the meeting has been rescheduled, and if so, for when.
In general, as a user's calendar becomes full, reschedulings may be recorded properly by the calendar, but may not become embedded in the user's consciousness. Thus, there is a need for a convenient way to enable users of electronic calendars to keep track of rescheduled meetings.